A Truce in Syria

Last Tuesday, Amaq, a news agency associated with the Islamic State, reported that isis fighters had captured the village of Khanaser from the Syrian government. Khanaser sits on the main supply route to the government-controlled part of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and it has been crucial in the recent campaign—backed by Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran—to crush the opposition rebels who hold the eastern part of the city. The battle for Aleppo, which began in 2012, has left tens of thousands of people dead and large parts of the city depopulated. On Thursday, it was reported that government forces had taken Khanaser back.

Under the “cessation of hostilities” announced last week by the United States and Russia, the battle for Khanaser will be allowed to go on, as will many other battles. The agreement, negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, stipulates that the government of President Bashar al-Assad and an array of rebel groups opposing it, which includes those backed by the United States and its allies, will stop fighting each other. But it does not cover operations involving either of the two strongest rebel groups, the Islamic State and the Al Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra.

Following a phone call with the White House last Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the deal could “radically” transform the situation in Syria, by laying the groundwork for negotiations. President Obama was less fulsome, but said that he hoped the truce could lead to a resumption of peace talks between the Syrian government and the rebel groups, and would help to bring the focus back to defeating isis. (The United Nations announced a new round of talks on Friday.) Aid groups said they hoped that the pause in the fighting might allow them to distribute more food and medicine within the country, where four hundred thousand people are living in areas under siege, and are threatened with starvation. (When aid workers were able to enter one of those areas recently—the Damascus suburb of Moadamiyeh—they found some residents reduced to eating grass.) Five million more people are being fed regularly by the United Nations’ World Food Programme, which ferries food into Syria.

In circumstances as dire as those in Syria—as many as half a million dead, half the prewar population driven from their homes—any agreement, however limited, that offers relief to the suffering ought to be celebrated. Still, it’s difficult to view the partial truce as much more than a ratification of the status quo that began when Putin ordered the Russian military intervention, last September. At the time, the war was at a stalemate, but there were signs that Assad’s regime, even with substantial help from Iran and Hezbollah, was teetering. Among other things, the regime, dependent on the country’s Alawite minority, no longer had enough soldiers to hold all its territory.

The Russian military effort, by directing its fire mostly at rebel groups backed by the United States, has enabled the Assad government to tighten its grasp on the strip of cities that stretches from Damascus to Aleppo and Latakia, the site of Russia’s base in Syria. The air campaign against isis and al-Nusra was left largely to the U.S., whose other allies have generally stood on the sidelines. Relief officials say that the Russian-backed offensives have created at least a hundred thousand new Syrian refugees and an untold number of displaced persons inside the country. Many of the refugees have headed for Europe, a migration that has amounted to something like revenge for the economic sanctions placed on Russia after its military intervention in Ukraine. The only curious aspect of Putin’s agreeing to the cessation of hostilities was the timing; before the temporary setback in Khanaser, the campaign by government forces to retake the rest of Aleppo appeared to be headed toward victory.

Other aspects of the truce are problematic: the leaders of Turkey, a member of nato, have declared that they will not honor the truce with respect to Kurdish forces in Syria, which they see as a branch of the Kurdish insurgency in their country. Until now, the Kurds in Syria have been the U.S.’s most effective ally in the fight against isis. Also, according to relief officials, many of the Syrians in need of food are in areas blockaded by the Army. Under the agreement, aid convoys are to be granted full access, but there is no assurance that they will be allowed to pass.

Most important, it’s not clear that a “cessation of hostilities” is enforceable—or that the Assad regime and its allies have any intention of abiding by its terms. Since the beginning of the uprising, Assad has referred to all those who oppose him as “terrorists,’’ and has treated them all, even children, with the same murderous intensity. There is no indication that he will start making distinctions between isis and al-Nusra and the groups that are party to the agreement. It’s more likely that he and his allies will carry on with their military operations in much the same way as before. Western intelligence agencies’ knowledge of which rebel groups occupy which neighborhoods is insubstantial, in part because the groups often come together and then break apart. In such circumstances, it’s difficult to imagine Assad and his allies holding their fire—and it’s difficult to imagine anyone in the West stopping them if they don’t.

With the exception of the air campaign against the Islamic State, the Obama Administration has refused to apply greater military pressure, in the form of either a no-fly zone to protect civilians or anything more than token assistance to the more moderate anti-Assad rebels. The reasons that President Obama has cited for this refusal are not unpersuasive, particularly the point that few of the groups are credible enough to mount a serious threat to Assad. But, in the absence of American power, the battlefield in Syria has been reshaped by others. According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama’s top security officials have already concluded that the Russians will not adhere to the agreement, and are searching for a Plan B. Assad and his confederates remain in power. A fresh round of negotiations and even a partial ceasefire are unlikely to change that, or the misery in places like Khanaser. ♦